NAME

gndaccess - Access GND records via HTTP

SYNOPSIS

The application is automatically started as service, listening on port 6699.

sudo service gndaccess {status|start|stop|restart}

DESCRIPTION

This applications provices a web service to access GND records via HTTP in different formats. The format must be provided with URL query parameter format.

• http://localhost:6699/4021477-1?format=aref

Supported formats

• aref: aREF format (RDF in JSON for easy access, similar to JSON-LD)
• jskos: JSKOS format (basic support)
• marcxml: MARC XML format
• nt: NTriples
• rdfxml: RDF/XML

CORS and JSONP

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is enabled by default. In addition all JSON-based formats can can be returned in JSONP with parameter callback:

• http://localhost:6699/4021477-1?format=aref&callback=abc

HTML client

The application includes an HTML client, consisting of the following files:

• index.html
• gndaccess.css
• gndaccess.json
• formats.json (generated dynamically)

INSTALLATION

The application is packaged as Debian package. Releases can be found at

• https://github.com/gbv/gndaccess/releases

No binaries are included, so the package should work on all architectures. It is tested with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Files are installed at the following locations:

• /srv/gndaccess/ - application
• /var/log/gndaccess/ - log files access.log and error.log
• /etc/logrotate.d/gndaccess - logrotate configuration (compress daily, keep 14 days)
• /etc/default/gndaccess - server configuration
• /etc/gndaccess/ - application configuration

CONFIGURATION

See /etc/default/gndaccess for basic configuration. Settings are not modified by updates. Only simple key value-pairs are allowed with the following keys:

• PORT - port number (required, 6699 by default)

• WORKERS - number of parallel connections (required, 5 by default). If put behind a HTTP proxy, this number is not affected by slow cient connections but only by the time of processing each request.

• PROXY - a space-or-comma-separated list of trusted IPs or IP-ranges (e.g. 192.168.0.0/16) to take from the X-Forwarded-For header. The special value * can be used to trust all IPs.

Restart is needed after changes.

The HTML client can be customized by putting static files into directory /etc/gndaccess/htdocs to override files in /srv/gndaccess/htdocs.

SEE ALSO

Changelog is located in file debian/changelog in the source code repository.

Source code and issue tracker at https://github.com/gbv/gndaccess. See file CONTRIBUTING.md` for source code organization.

See http://www.dnb.de/entityfacts for a similar service.